Saying he didn’t want to increase taxes, Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday rejected a proposal to let East Peoria and Morton raise their local hotel tax rates by a single percentage point, to 6 percent.

Adriana Colindres

Saying he didn’t want to increase taxes, Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday rejected a proposal to let East Peoria and Morton raise their local hotel tax rates by a single percentage point, to 6 percent.

“I recognize and appreciate the hard work of the sponsors in passing this legislation,” Blagojevich wrote in a message accompanying his veto of Senate Bill 2676. “However, I cannot sign this legislation because it raises taxes on consumers.”

Sen. David Koehler, D-Peoria, was the lead Senate sponsor of the bill, and he said Tuesday that he plans to seek an override of the governor’s veto.

To accomplish that, he will need 36 votes in the Senate and 71 in the House of Representatives. Overriding a veto requires three-fifths approval from each chamber.

That might prove to be a tough task. When the legislature passed the bill in the spring, the Senate vote was 38-14 and the House vote was 64-48.

Peoria-area lawmakers say the legislation, sought by the Peoria Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, is important to central Illinois’ tourism promotion and economic development. Brent Lonteen, president and chief executive officer of the bureau, has worked with local officials to try to ensure that Peoria, East Peoria, Pekin, Morton and Washington have uniform hotel tax rates.

Peoria’s rate already is 6 percent. Lonteen has said that raising the rates in the other communities would generate about $150,000 in extra revenue to invest in tourism marketing.

Because East Peoria and Morton are non-home-rule communities, they would need state government’s authorization to increase their hotel tax rates beyond 5 percent. The other three communities are home-rule entities and can do it on their own.

Even if the legislation eventually becomes law, the East Peoria City Council and the Morton Village Board still would need to vote to increase their hotel tax rates before any changes could take effect.

Lonteen said Tuesday night that he had “kind of expected” the governor’s veto because he has a track record of spurning anything that even remotely hints at a tax increase.

“This wasn’t a tax increase, though,” he said. “This was a permissive bill.”

Blagojevich also changed several other pieces of legislation Tuesday, some in significant ways.

Blagojevich is trying again to require insurance companies to cover autism disorders for children age 21 and younger. He had put that language in a House bill in July but lawmakers didn’t act on the change, so the bill died. Now he’s trying the same approach on another House bill.

Blagojevich inserted language requiring the State Board of Education to provide food allergy guidelines to schools and requiring schools to then implement policies for managing students with life-threatening food allergies by January 2010.

The governor also expanded medical discounts for many uninsured people, offered more credit or housing counseling notice to homeowners with delinquent loans and limited a proposed requirement about newspaper publishing of premiums in the state’s AllKids health insurance program.

Adriana Colindres can be reached at (217) 782-6292 or adriana.colindres@sj-r.com. Ryan Keith contributed to this report.

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